WiFi WLAN Wireless Mesh FM Radio UHF TV Media Blog

Using people-owned broadcast technology to reach people. Free exchange of news and views, solidarity and understanding by means of cheap technology.
A WIFI MESH WIRELESS SELF-ORGANISING NETWORK RADIO TV TRANSMITTER in a small weather-proof case that fits into the centre of an obsolete satellite-dish, each node additionally broadcasting analogue 88.0MHz 0.2W FM radio and channel 37 UHF TV. The digital standards are 16kbitMono Audio - xvid 320x240pix 80kbit video - 802-11b wifi peers.

Monday, November 28, 2011

CHINA BANS TV ADVERTISEMENT

China has banned advertisements during dramas and movies on television in the Communist party's latest move to assert control over the country's increasingly commercial media industry.

The rules, which come into effect in January, ban TV stations from running ads during films and drama episodes that run for 45 minutes or more. Analysts said they could slow the world's fastest-growing big advertising market next year, as the party's media campaign starts to have a commercial impact, or divert TV ad budgets to other media.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, an arm of the propaganda department, has over the past two years stepped up its meddling in TV networks' operations. In 2010, it cut the amount of commercials stations could broadcast in prime time by a quarter. This year, it has pushed networks to cut entertainment programming in favour of morally edifying shows.

Earlier this year, the regulator forced Hunan TV, China's most commercially successful provincial broadcaster, to take "Supergirl", the nation's first and most successful talent show, off the air. Officials told the broadcaster that entertainment should take a back seat to "values, responsibility and quality".

In a key policy document passed last month, the Communist party pledged "cultural system reform" and said it wanted both to have market forces drive the media industry and for the party to control it.

The regulator explained its latest move with the desire to implement the leadership's decision, and "to fully utilise the TV networks to build a public cultural service system, raise the quality of public cultural services and guarantee the people's basic cultural rights".

Analysts said the new rules could throw the industry into disarray. Zhao Yihe, head of research at Charm Communications, one of China's leading advertising agencies, said they were "not going to be a lethal blow" to TV stations, but that they would hurt their ability to make money.

FINANCIAL TIMES DOESN'T GET IT. THEY CONTINUE TO WOFFLE ON ABOUT THE HOLY DOLLAR.

"I expect this to shave one or two percentage points off the growth rate of TV advertising next year, which we originally forecast to be about 15 per cent," said Mr Zhao. GroupM, the world's largest media investment management group, predicts that China's television ad spending will hit Rmb201bn ($31.4bn) this year, up 13 per cent from last year.

However, Seth Grossman, managing director of Carat China, said the Aegis-owned media agency had not changed its 11.8 per cent growth forecast for the whole Chinese ad market in 2012 because advertisers were likely to move money to other Chinese media.

"The first impact will be on [TV ad] pricing. China is still a very high demand environment, and that's a classic inflationary pressure. This doesn't take money out of the Chinese advertising market. It will go elsewhere," he said, predicting benefits for local television channels, online video outlets and outdoor advertising companies.

Domestic companies are the biggest spenders on Chinese TV ads, but some foreign brands like Nike, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Sony are also present. Mr Zhao said the new regulations would create short term chaos as TV networks renegotiate advertising slots that were auctioned off as recently as this month.

... against capitalist excess

French Former First Lady Mitterrand Dies At 87

PARIS (AP) — Well before the Occupy movement took on Wall Street, the former first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, was leading the charge against capitalist excess.

"Everybody knows that the foundation of the system today is money: Money is the guru, money decides everything … That's why we are working to get out of this system," she told RTL radio last month, summing up a lifelong cause in one of her last interviews before her death Tuesday at 87.

Such resistance defined the life of Mitterrand, the widow of France's first Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand.

At age 19, with World War II raging, she went underground in the Burgundy hills with the French Resistance. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre for her work against the Nazi occupation of France and met her future husband, who had joined up under the code name "Francois Morland."

That union eventually gave her a bully pulpit — during Francois' 14 years as president — that she used to advocate for many left-leaning causes. She supported Marxist rebels in El Salvador, ethnic minorities such as Kurds and Tibetans and vociferously opposed capitalist excess.

They also had three sons together, one of whom, Pascal, died at a young age.

Danielle Mitterrand died before dawn after being hospitalized at Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris in recent days for fatigue, her foundation France Libertes said.

As first lady, Mitterrand shucked the tradition of her predecessors who largely kept to the background. In a 1986 interview with The Associated Press, her blue eyes flashed at the suggestion she resembled a high-profile American first lady.

"There is no traditional role" for a first lady, Mitterrand said. "Each woman has her own personality and … acts according to her conscience and her sensibilities."

Yet in contrast to her outspoken approach to politics, she kept quiet for years about one aspect of her personal life: a secret relationship her husband had had with Anne Pingeot, a museum curator 28 years his junior and the mother of his long-secret daughter, Mazarine Pingeot.

He died of cancer less than a year after leaving office in 1995. In an especially poignant moment in French politics, the widowed Danielle stood before the late president's coffin alongside his mistress and daughter, whose out-of-wedlock birth and existence were long kept from the French public.

Her foundation said Danielle Mitterrand found guidance in a phrase of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: "It's not right to want to heal the suffering of people without committing to fight the very causes of this suffering."

She created several charities and crisscrossed the world in defense of human rights. She once even kissed Cuba's revolutionary Fidel Castro at a residence for visiting dignitaries near the presidential Elysee Palace.

Mitterrand urged worldwide unity to "put an end to economic and financial dictatorship, the henchman of political dictators. Finally, they seem to be shaken by the anger of peoples."

"Of course, the world revolves around the Dow Jones, the Nikkei stock index or the CAC 40 (French stock index). … But all around the world, little voices are being raised to say that man is unhappy even if the stock market is doing well," Mitterrand told Le Figaro newspaper in 1996.

Thirteen years ago, Mitterrand visited in prison Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who has spent nearly 30 years on death row over his 1982 conviction for killing a white police officer in Philadelphia.

And in 2008, Mitterrand denounced American support for foes of Bolivia's leftist president Evo Morales, and accused "fascist gangs" of intimidating native peoples in the South American country.

France Libertes, whose focus has been human rights and had recently made a top priority of getting drinking water to those without it around the world, said Mitterrand left behind "a message of hope."

Praise and appreciation for her poured in from across France's political spectrum Tuesday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said: "Neither the setback or the victory caused her to deviate from the road she had laid for herself: giving a hearing to the voice of those that no one wanted to hear."

Her nephew Frederic Mitterrand, who now serves as culture minister in Sarkozy's conservative government, told BFM TV that his aunt "did a lot to humanize the role of first ladies."

Danielle Emilienne Isabelle Gouze was born Oct. 29, 1924 in Verdun, a town in northeastern France known as one of World War I's biggest killing fields.

Under the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II, her father, a Socialist-leaning school principal, lost his job after refusing a state order to list all Jewish students and teachers for authorities, according to Mitterrand's foundation.

In March 1944, she took her own stand and joined the Resistance.

She is survived by sons Gilbert and Jean-Christophe. A burial service is planned Saturday in the eastern town of Cluny, her foundation said.

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Lindsay Lohan playboy shots Monroe like?

playboyx and Lindsay Lohan born July 2, 1986 Lindsay Lohan playboy LL is an American actress, pop singer and model. She began her career as a child fashion model before making her motion picture debut in Disney's 1998 remake of The Parent Trap at the age of 11. Lohan gained further fame between 2003 and 2005 with leading roles in the films Freaky Friday, Mean Girls and Herbie: Fully Loaded, subsequently appearing in independent films including Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion and Emilio Estevez's Bobby.

Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan 2010–present In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, Lohan gave fund-raising assistance to the British Red Cross in March 2010 to provide aid for the country.

Lindsay Lohan She plays April, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy businessman. Her character takes drugs, is naked in much of her appearance and later dons a nuns habit while toting a machine gun. The Washington Post described Lohan's character as "a campier, trampier version of herself – or at least her tabloid image"

Lindsay Lohan In June 2010, Lohan made an appearance on the Bravo television series Double Exposure

On September 24 Lohan's probation was revoked following a failed drug test. On February 9, 2011, Lohan was charged with the theft of a necklace reported stolen from a jewelry store in January.

Lohan will appear on the January/February 2012 issue of Playboy magazine.Hugh Hefner described the shoot as being inspired by a nude pictorial of Marilyn Monroe which was in first issue of Playboy.Following a switch to Universal Motown, Lohan began working on a third album, tentatively titled Spirit in the Dark, in late 2007 and released "Bossy" in May 2008.

In February 2010, Ne-Yo, with whom Lohan had been collaborating, stated in an interview, "We were doing some stuff and then it just fell off and hasn't got back on. I'm not gonna hold my breath."[

Saturday, November 05, 2011

CO2 and Oil consumption

Germans Horrified, Outraged By New CO2 Recordcaused by Growing Global Dirty Economy, Third World capitalist Development

The climate summit in Durban is coming up and so expect a steady stream of shocking, frightful climate reports to come out over the weeks ahead. The latest comes from the US Department of Energy, which shows that global man-made CO2 emissions have reached shocking record levels.

Last year more than 9100 million tons of CO2 were emitted into the atmosphere. The reaction by the media in Germany today has been one of utter horror.

Just weeks before the UN climate conference in Durban South Africa, the US Department of Energy spooks the world with grim news: New preliminary results show that the emissions of the climate-killing gas Co2 is rising dramatically.

Alone in China and India CO2 emissions emissions climbed 10 percent."

German Green Party Chairwoman Claudia Roth called the latest figures "alarming at an extreme scale." Eberhard Brandes, Chairman of WWF Germany, is outraged and said: "The data coming out of the USA are shocking and exceed the worst our fears and pessimistic scenarios."

Since 1751 approximately 347 billion tons of carbon have been released to the atmosphere from the consumption of fossil fuels and cement production. Half of these emissions have occurred since the mid 1970s. The 2008 global fossil-fuel carbon emission estimate, 8749 million metric tons of carbon, represents an all-time high and a 2.4% increase from 2007.

Globally, liquid and solid fuels accounted for 76.3% of the emissions from fossil-fuel burning and cement production in 2008. Combustion of gas fuels (e.g., natural gas) accounted for 18.5% (1616 million metric tons of carbon) of the total emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 and reflects a gradually increasing global utilization of natural gas. Emissions from cement production (386 million metric tons of carbon in 2008) have more than doubled since the mid 1970s and now represent 4.4% of global CO2 releases from fossil-fuel burning and cement production. Gas flaring, which accounted for roughly 2% of global emissions during the 1970s, now accounts for less than 1% of global fossil-fuel releases.

1 Tonne (7,3 Barrels) Crude-Oil is 1161 Litres = 1.161 cubic metres.USA 903 per year (divided by 365) = 2.48 million tons per day times 1.161 = 2.87 million cubic meters per day. A cube that is 142 meters high and 142 meters wide and 142 meters long.every day. Canada 70 metres cube. Burned into smoke every day.Peru 7mio/yr 28 meter cube. World 3910 tons per year =

The total world consumption of crude oil in 1996 was 71.7 million barrels per day (there are 42 US gallons in a barrel, or 159 litres). 71 700 000 * 159 = 2.25km cube10.7 million tons raw oil used per day wordlwide, 3910 mio ton pre year WORLD

Rotten Tomatoes Legendary filmmaker Agnes Varda takes digital camcorder in hand and roams about the French countryside in search of "gleaners." An age-old practice, as depicted in Millet's famous painting, performed traditionally by peasant women, gleaners scavenged the remains of a crop after the harvest. Varda finds their modern-day equivalent collecting rejected potatoes outside of Lyon, fallen apples in Provence, and refuse in the markets of Paris. Along the way, she talks to a man sporting yellow rubber boots who has lived on trash for ten years, a gourmet chef who gleans for his restaurant, a homeless doctorate in biology who teaches literacy courses to immigrants for free, a couple of artists who use trash in their work, and the grandson of early cinema innovator Étienne-Jules Marey. Along the way, Varda discusses heart-shaped potatoes, big trucks on the highway, the waste of consumerism, and the ravages of time. This film was screened at the 2000 Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals.

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; A Reaper of the Castoff, Be It Material or Human

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: September 30, 2000

''The Gleaners and I'' takes its title, and some of its inspiration, from an 1867 painting by Jean-Francois Millet that shows three women in a wheat field, stooping to pick up sheaves and kernels left behind after the harvest. The image is well known; it appears in the Larousse Dictionary of the French Language alongside the definition of the verb ''glaner'' (to glean). The painting itself, which hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, shows up early in Agnes Varda's wonderful new documentary, thronged by camera-wielding tourists.

The painting -- or, more accurately, the activity it depicts -- sent Ms. Varda, a warm, intrepid woman in her early 70's and one of the bravest, most idiosyncratic of French filmmakers, on a tour of her own. From September 1999 until May of this year, she crisscrossed the French countryside with a hand-held digital video camera and a small production crew, in search of people who scavenge in potato fields, apple orchards and vineyards, as well as in urban markets and curbside trash depositories. Some are motivated by desperate need, others by disgust at the wastefulness all around them and others by an almost mystical desire to make works of art out of things -- castoff dolls, old refrigerators, windshield wipers -- that have been thrown away without a second thought.

Ms. Varda, their patient interlocutor, also sees herself as a gleaner in her own right. (The film's French title, ''Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse,'' makes this plain.) She plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore. She is a constant, funny presence in the film, providing piquant voice-over narration and allowing herself visual and verbal digressions on the state of her aging hands, the water damage on her ceiling and her portable camera's dancing lens cap.

She is also an indefatigably curious, skeptical and sympathetic observer. ''The Gleaners and I'' is both a diary and a kind of extended essay on poverty, thrift and the curious place of scavenging in French history and culture. The patrons of a provincial bar explain the difference between gleaning and picking; a magistrate in black robes stands in a cabbage field and cites the section of the French penal code (Article R-26.10) and the royal edict of Nov. 2, 1554, that establish the right to glean. This bureaucratic side of the national temperament is also embodied by an apple farmer who explains the system he has developed for registering and licensing those who wish to gather his unharvested fruit.

For all its gentle humor -- there is a hilarious dispute about just how many oysters one is allowed to gather after a storm -- Ms. Varda's film uncovers a subterranean world of poverty and loneliness in the midst of plenty. An elderly peasant woman recalls the old days, when, as in Millet's painting, gleaning was a communal activity, festive and sociable even as it was backbreaking. Now, Ms. Varda notes, people scavenge alone, and they gather not only agricultural surplus but supermarket trash as well.

And yet ''The Gleaners and I'' is never depressing. Even at their most desperate -- a former truck driver, fired for drinking on the job, who lives in a shabby trailer; a group of disaffected young people who vandalize hulking trash bins -- Ms. Varda's gleaners retain a resilient, generous humanity that is clearly brought to the surface by her own tough, open spirit.

The film is studded with found metaphors and serendipitous insights, like the collection of heart-shaped potatoes Ms. Varda brings home from her travels. They're coarse, homely objects, misshapen and flecked with dirt, unmarketable in the view of the potato growers. But their poetic value is self-evident. ''I'm something of a leftover myself,'' Ms. Varda remarked to journalists covering the New York Film Festival, where ''The Gleaners and I'' will be shown tomorrow night. This was a charming bit of modesty. She's a treasure.

THE GLEANERS AND I

Directed by Agnes Varda; commentary (in French with English subtitles) by Ms. Varda; directors of photography, Stephane Krausz, Didier Rouget, Didier Doussin, Pascal Sautelet and Ms. Varda; edited by Ms. Varda and Laurent Pineau; music by Joanna Bruzdowicz; produced by Cine Tamaris; released by Zeitgeist Films. Running time: 82 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown with a 10-minute short, Eric Oriot's ''Later,'' tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall as part of the 38th New York Film Festival.

WITH: Bodan Litnanski, Agnes Varda and Francois Wertheimer.

In Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners & I (a more literal translation from the original French would be "The Gleaners & The Gleaner", or even "The Gleaneress") play, investigation, and contemplation are all intricately yet loosely wound together – each element distinct yet forming an unpretentiously ambitious whole, much like the found-object artworks Varda highlights throughout. Her subject, as you might have gathered (no pun intended), is gleaning: in all its forms. We are introduced to the classical gleaners, the peasant women who would follow the harvest by crouching and stooping through the fields, rummaging for leftovers once the more illustrious agricultural bounty was carried off. We see such gleaners in famous French paintings, and meet one or two who reminisce only – it seems that this more traditional form of gleaning has fallen by the wayside: mechanized reaping has become too precise and so few crops are left behind these days. This we learn in the first five minutes of the 90-minute film; what follows is an eager, inquisitive investigation of gleaning in all its latter-day manifestations…

We travel back and forth across France "capturing" passing trucks; shuffle through potato wastelands alongside single mothers and homeless alcoholics; observe running legal commentaries offered by robed justices standing incongruously in vineyards and in trash heaps. We see gleaners in vineyards, along the seashore, on city streets; meet various artists who incorporate abandoned junk into their own work; visit a children's museum which makes trash shiny and colorful. Finally we discover a post-graduate gleaner who picks through garbage to find food, his eccentricity giving way to erudite pedagogy when it's revealed that he teaches French to Senegalese immigrants, free of charge, of his own volition. Those are the gleaners – what of "I" (or as the original title puts it, the gleaner – singular)? She's Varda, of course, perpetually playing peekaboo with her own camera, narrating with a mixture of carefree bravado, pensive reflection, and endless fascination. Much, if not most, of what we see is filmed by her, so even when we aren't hearing or seeing her, she's present – the video filters her vision and consciousness, which together filter the outside world for us.

The lo-fi visuals are at once liberating and relatively nondescript – they do not carry the punch of celluloid, the automatic "magic", but they do convey a quiet, gentle charm, a looseness that is more observational and in some ways more sensitive than traditional filmmaking allows. This highlights the distinction between what is captured and how Varda captures it (the raw material of reality and the way she selects, composes, edits, comments upon, and interacts with what we see). This formal component provides a nice rhyme for the film's thematic material, in which utilitarian consumer goods are given aesthetic rebirth, waste is turned into food, and trash becomes personalized and beautiful. The aesthetic becomes practical, the practical becomes aesthetic, and the useless finds its uses – or rather has them found for it. Right away, the movie presents an awareness of beauty's ambiguity, opening not just with footage of gleaners at work, but gleaners glamorized, in the paintings of Millet and Breton. (Following a grim episode focusing on the dire poverty of some gleaners, there's a moment of reflection in Burgundy for Van der Weyden's "The Last Judgement", and briefly the film is haunted by the pitiable writhing of the damned.)

In presenting those works of art that commemorate gleaning, Varda seems aware that such paintings tend to romanticize what can be a very hard way of living – and yet to deny the beauty of these paintings would be absurd, and self-defeating. Varda's own filmmaking style, an engaging combination of doc and home movie, strikes an ongoing, fragile balance between respect for those she is filming and an almost naive sense of wonder; in both cases, curiosity serves her, and us, best. We draw our own conclusions without feeling that she has concealed her own point of view from us – or, at the same time, that her own point of view is necessarily any more fixed than our own. At times metatextual (but very, very playfully so), the movie – shot on a video camera at the turn-of-the-millennium – seems a synthesis of various documentary traditions, stretching all the way back to Etienne-Jules Marey, whose "chronophotography" was a forerunner of the cinema. (Marey's great grandson owns a vineyard which Varda visits, examining both his sympathetic treatment of gleaners and curation of a museum honoring his ancestor.)

Indeed, Varda has "gleaned" all the documentary techniques and approaches of the past hundred years: the personal diary, the man-on-the-street interview, the verite observation, the didactic montage, the found footage, the expert fact-finding interview – and all viewpoints are explored, political, personal, social, aesthetic alike. And what frames all of this borrowing, what gives it its own life, is Varda's use of the video camera – the way she filters all these devices through the humble yet infinitely resonant context of home moviemaking. (She even includes an accidentally-filmed "dance of the lens cap"; while some find such indulgence bizarre and laughable, many of us will find it charming, particularly those who recognize the complex framework within which such proudly amateurish moments are allowed to flourish.) To the extent the film has a "message" – generally it's more subtle and rich than that – it is an encouragement of this sort of personal gleaning; The Gleaners & I spurs us on to open our eyes and see the potential of society's refuse, the spiritual in the material, even as we are discouraged from ignoring the darker undertones of prettified consciousness. By the end of the film, encouraged by Varda's own highly individual, yet "open" perspective, that "I" in the title could be us as well

No fruit left behind

Two years ago, April Lee and Chetan Mangat were living in Honolulu and two experiences led them to create their new online produce exchange GoGlean.org. One night they saw Agnès Varda's film The Gleaners and I (a look at harvesting—as former agrarian duty and modern urban survival). It also happened to be mango season. They saw the irony of $2 Costa Rican mangoes being sold in a town where yardfuls of fruit were rotting.

"There are so many mangoes going to waste," said Lee by phone from Cambridge, where she is a student at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. "Then you go to markets and you expect to see local produce and for whatever reason you see imported fruits. It makes sense to create an online forum managed by the public. You supply them with the tool to connect them with each other."

The website is like a craigslist for fresh food. You open an account, and let people know what you have and where they can get it. Right now there are a couple of farmers on there, but a lot of the notices are for "found" fruit—people disclosing where the wild things are, such as "berries that look like blueberries" in Brooklyn's McCarren Park, or strawberry guavas on the loop trail in Keaiwa Heiau State Park. I don't know about you, but I don't want an hour hike to turn into a fruitless search. That's some lean gleaning. People also put out the word on more accessible pickins—April let people know about a treefull of "almost ripe pears spotted on the north/east side of the parking lot of Trader Joe's in Cambridge."

But as word spreads, site users may be finding themselves in situations more like the good ol' days portrayed in Vargas' documentary. "Chetan's been talking with farmers in New York, and they're keen on him going back to the original idea of connecting farmers with people," said Lee. "If people can take farmers' surplus it will be mutually beneficial for people and farmers, as farmers don't have to then get rid of the leftovers."

Lee and Mangat are the type of people who think nothing of cooking for hours for a houseful of people—some of whom they might not even know—and do it with genuine smiles. They offer GoGlean as a community service.

"We want people who want the food to get involved," says Lee, no matter where they are. If you happen to be going to Brazil soon, through GoGlean, you know you can get free surplus seasonal fruits and vegetables from Fazenda Armengue in Trancoso, Bahia. Lee knew Fazenda Armengue owner Rich Rossmassler when he ran Geneva, New York-based Red Jacket Orchards' greenmarket program in New York City.

Lee, originally from Honolulu, worked at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (where she was my colleague) as curator of special projects before moving to Los Angeles' Hammer Museum for a stint as a curatorial assistant. In Cambridge she is also studying at MIT's Media Laboratory. Mangat, who hails from India and makes his home in Brooklyn, founded Blank & Co., where his clients include the shop The Reed Space and Zing Magazine.

"We both are kind of involved in the possibilities of new media technology for community participation," says Lee. Along with GoGlean, Mangat has also developed the project The Labelmakers, an online effort to "allow every citizen to be actively involved in how we label our foods."

It's avocado season in Hawai'i right now. If you've got an overactive tree, go share your bounty online. 6 November

Thursday, November 03, 2011

It happened again - this time in Germany -- RUBBISH ART

Overzealous cleaner ruins £690,000 artwork that she thought was dirty

She scoured off a layer of paint in a sculpture by late German artist Martin Kippenberger on loan to a museum in Dortmund

The artwork, entitled When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling, consists of a trough under a wooden tower of slats.An overzealous cleaner in Germany has ruined a piece of modern art worth £690,000 after mistaking it for an eyesore that needed a good scrub.

The sculpture by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, widely regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation until his death in 1997, had been on loan to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund when it fell prey to the cleaner's scouring pad.

The work, called When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn's anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), comprised a rubber trough placed underneath a rickety wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, Kippenberger had spread a layer of paint representing dried rainwater. He thought it was art: the cleaner saw it as a challenge, and set about making the bucket look like new.

A spokeswoman for the museum told German media that the female cleaner "removed the patina from the four walls of the trough".

"It is now impossible to return it to its original state," she said, adding that it had been on loan to the museum from a private collector and was valued by insurers at €800,000 (£690,000).

She said that cleaning crews had been told to keep 20cm (8in) away from artworks, but it was unclear if the woman – who worked for a company to which cleaning had been outsourced – had received the memo.

If Kippenberger is now turning in his grave, he may find solace in the fact that he is not the only artist to have his works ruined by cleaners. In 1986, a "grease stain" by Joseph Beuys valued at about €400,000 was mopped away at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf.

At least the artwork didn't end up in a skip. In 2004, a cleaner at Tate Britain in London threw away*** part of a work by another German artist, Gustav Metzger, after mistaking it for rubbish. The cleaner failed to realise that a plastic bag containing discarded paper and cardboard was an integral part of Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, and not just some litter. The bag was later recovered, but it was too damaged to display, so Metzger replaced it with another bag.

Germans are not the only victims. In 2001, Damien Hirst lost a pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups, meant to represent the life of an artist, when a caretaker at the Eyestorm Gallery in London cleared it away###.

*** Cleaner bins rubbish bag artwork

The bag of rubbish was part of Metzger's Recreation of the First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art

A bag of rubbish that was part of a Tate Britain work of art has been accidentally thrown away by a cleaner.

The bag filled with discarded paper and cardboard was part of a work by Gustav Metzger, said to demonstrate the "finite existence" of art.

It was thrown away by a cleaner at the London gallery, which subsequently retrieved the damaged bag.

The 78-year-old artist replaced it with a new bag. The gallery would not reveal whether he would be compensated.

'Integral part'

The bag was part of Metzger's Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, a copy of a piece he produced in 1960.

Tate Britain said the work "is made up of several elements, one of which is a rubbish bag included by the artist as an integral part of the installation".

"On 30 June, the bag was accidentally removed and damaged but was subsequently replaced."

The gallery said the work is now covered over at night so it cannot be removed again, and staff have been made aware that the rubbish bag is part of the exhibit.

Damien Hirst's 2001 installation was also mistaken for rubbish

Metzger, a German artist who lives in east London, invented "auto-destructive" art in 1959.

The work also features an "acid painting" - nylon covered in acid which slowly destroys it to illustrate the transient nature of paintings, sculptures and other artworks.

It is part of the gallery's Art and the 60s exhibition, which looks at art after 1956 and also includes works by David Hockney and Peter Blake.

It is not the first time such a mistake has been made. In 2001 a cleaner at a London's Eyestorm Gallery gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst, having mistaken it for a pile of rubbish.

The collection of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays was said to represent the chaos of an artist's studio.

And in the 1980s the work of Joseph Beuys, which featured a very dirty bath, was scrubbed clean by a gallery worker in Germany.

###Cleaner clears up Hirst's ashtray art

Damien Hirst setting up the untitled installation at the Eyestorm gallery

It is often said that modern art is rubbish, but never did it ring as true as when an art gallery cleaner binned a work by Damien Hirst because he thought the installation was exactly that - leftover rubbish.

Emmanuel Asare thought the piles of full ashtrays, half-filled coffee cups, empty beer bottles and newspapers strewn across the gallery were the remnants of a party in the west London gallery.

Although that is what it was, this rubbish had been arranged by Hirst into an impromptu installation, which increased its value by thousands.

Hirst had arrived at the launch party of a new exhibition of his work, Painting-By-Numbers, on Tuesday night at the Eyestorm gallery. When asked how he would like his prints to be displayed in the windows, the artist, famed for his formaldehyde animals, decided to create a new work.

The next morning when Mr Asare arrived for work, he decided to clean up the mess straight away by putting it all in bin bags. Mr Asare said: "As soon as I clapped eyes on it I sighed because there was so much mess.

"I didn't think for a second that it was a work of art - it didn't look much like art to me. So I cleared it all into binbags and dumped it."

Staff were dispatched to find the binbags in the rubbish, and salvaged the various objects, which they used to reconstruct the installation from photographs taken earlier.

Hirst, 35, said the piles of junk represented an artist's studio and said the mistake was "fantastic. Very funny."

"The cleaner obviously ought to be promoted to an art critic of a national newspaper. He clearly has a fine critical eye and can spot rubbish, just as the child could see that the emperor wasn't wearing any new clothes," he said.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Some cartoons you might enjoy

Corporate ThinkTank... God help us all.instead of ending poverty, lets fill the world with despair and hopelessness so people turn to terrorism.

Banks must be shrunk and split up.They must not control us. ATTACAssociation for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens' Action is an activist organization originally created for promoting the establishment of a tax on foreign exchange transactions.

The media is untrustworthy, turn off the TV!!

The main issues covered by ATTAC today are:

Control of financial markets (e.g., Tobin tax)

"Fair" instead of "free" trade, via democratic control of the World Trade Organisation and international financial institutions such the International Monetary Fund, Worldbank, European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, Free Trade Area of the Americas, and G8.

Defense of public goods - air, water, information

Defense of public social services - like those relevant to health, social services, and social security. For example, it is against the privatisation of pensions and of the health care system. ATTAC has also taken a position on genetically-modified organisms. ATTAC also opposes General Agreement on Trade in Services.

The struggle to end tax evasion (tax havens) as practiced by transnational corporations and rich individuals

Sustainable globalisation

Cancellation of the debt of Developing Countries.

ATTAC campaigned against the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.